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A couple hours ago, the 2017 Sitecore Symposium officially kicked off with a fantastic keynote by Sitecore CEO Mark Frost. Sitecore 9 is officially here and the entire Sitecore community’s excitement level is at an all time high! (Excitement levels determined by the data collected, sent to Cortex using xConnect.)

I feel like an excited little Superboy, sleepily opening gifts on a wintery Ohio Christmas morning in 1984. Flash forward 33 years, I am now an excited little Sitecore Superman, sleepily opening Sitecore 9 on a hot, Las Vegas afternoon.

Sitecore 9 comes with a lot of new exciting features. With so much to choose from, I decided to take a Pre-Symposium boot camp focusing on xConnect and Data Exchange Framework, I also plan on attending all the xConnect seminars this week.

In the new Spider-Man: Homecoming movie, Peter Parker received an awesome, high-tech suit. One of the cool features of this suit is the new 🕸 web utilities he now has at his disposal. Excited, Spider-Man didn’t hesitate and rushed into web development without understanding the basic functionality of these tools… naturally, hilarity ensued. 🕷

As you may know, I spend a lot of my free time exploring Sitecore’s tools, utilities and the rest of its inner workings. I find it fun understanding how various pieces of Sitecore works. If you ask my wife about my love of everything Sitecore, she’d roll her eyes. Kathy would tell you she wishes I showed the same passion to learn how to safely and properly handle the various (deadly🛠) tools in our garage.

Think of me as Tim from Home Improvement. Tim knew more about tools than I and he also got injured more. I too have had many close calls, lil’blood loss, stitches and lots of bruises🤕. It’s important to understand what you’re working with; if you don’t, you could find yourself in a bind.

Learn everything you can about Sitecore, front and back, inside and out. While you are doing that, you should also get familiar with the basics like the Sitecore’s Utilities. You don’t have to use the code the Sitecore devs worked hard creating for us, but without knowing Sitecore’s most basic functionality, you could be missing out on learning something new and possibly cool.

I prefer to do all my commerce activities online and I wish my daughter would as well. The thought of taking my teenage daughter shopping frightens me to my core😱. Not only am I extremely uncomfortable in that setting but it also completely ruins my plans for the day. How anyone can enjoy spending multiple hours in a mall; I honestly can’t see how that is possible.

Long ago, when I was a teenager I hated the mall experience but unfortunately Amazon was in its infancy and their product selection was not as diverse as it is today. I would often dream about the future where I never had to leave the house to shop. It took well over a decade, but that dream is now reality. Today almost everything can be purchased from a commerce site with minimal human interaction and have it delivered to your doorstep.

Online commerce is the present and future of shopping so it’s imperative that the right commerce software is selected. We need to be sure that the software will easily mesh seamlessly with Sitecore. There are many commerce options on the market to choose from, but how do you pick the right one for your implementation? Hopefully the choice is made prior to development and it needs to fit the overall strategy.

Not to brag, but I have some knowledge about everything Sitecore 🙄🤣. I’m not saying the knowledge is substantial by any means, but it’s something more or less😆. For example, today, July 28th 2017, I know very little about the Sitecore Print Experience Manager and the Email Experience Manager. However, I know how to install it! That little piece of knowledge is going to eventually grow 🤣. There might be some other products or modules that I have neglected, but the largest area is Sitecore Commerce.

I was talking to my mentor Jon recently about Sitecore Ignition and various other topics and he mentioned on how he’s been constantly slammed with work. Jon’s so busy I think he’s forgot what having free time feels like. It’s nice, Jon 😏, free time is nice.

Finding free time is one of my super powers. However, as great as I am at finding time, I am unable to share the time I find. Aware of my powers as Sitecore Superman, Jon asked me for a favor. Since I am happy to help my Sitecore friends and I hate to let free time expire I told Jon I would be happy to help.

Before I begin I am under the assumption SOLR is going to be a diva.👸🏻 Why? I don’t know, guess it’s a gut feeling or a lame attempt to get a laugh. I don’t know what craziness awaits, however, I am pretty sure SOLR won’t request me to alphabetize it’s M&Ms.

SOLR gave me a list of demands that I must complete before it will start working. Those can be found here. Looking over its demands, it appears I need to use the command prompt… awesome…. not really. I dislike the cmd and I avoid it as much as possible. My dislike for the cmd is totally based on my lack of overall knowledge about its syntax and commands and my laziness to learn more. All I know is how to change directories👍🏻 👏🏻, and that’s it, everything else requires Google searches.